Although more than twenty years have passed since the publication of Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), the ability of that groundbreaking study to stimulate new ways of considering monumental works of Renaissance culture has hardly diminished. Fashioning Identities in Renaissance Art is a collection of essays inspired by Greenblatt’s work that attempts to extend his concept of literary self-fashioning to a wide array of examples in the visual arts.

Fashioning Identities contains fifteen essays: the introductory first chapter by Joanna Woods-Marsden, which provides both a summary of and context for the volume’s contents, and fourteen chapters of specific case studies. The individual essays are extremely interesting, original, well researched, and well written. They focus overwhelmingly on Italian subjects; only two chapters treat non-Italian material, specifically English art. If we temporarily exclude the latter two essays, we are left with a highly Vasarian construction of the Renaissance: these essays are presented in chronological order, beginning with Laura Jacobus’s discussion of portraits of Enrico Scrovegni in the Arena Chapel and ending with Paola Tinagli’s study of the image of the prince confected by Vasari himself in the Ragionamenti.

This construct, however, works very well for the unity of the volume, and the English examples do not seem extraneous to the discourse. In her preface to the collection, Mary Rogers informs us that the essays in Fashioning Identities were first presented orally as papers at a conference held in 1998 at Exeter. This has become an enormously popular way of identifying authors working on particular topics and assembling papers for publication in our field, with widely varying results. This book, however, is so intelligently assembled and edited that it should interest even those not directly studying the material at hand as a model for adapting and producing a collection of this sort. Authors were apparently held to such rigorous standards of length and style that their essays read almost like chapters written by a single voice—an admirable, if rarely attained, result for such edited works, and surely the principal reason for the volume’s exemplary coherence.

In the first case study (Chapter 2), Jacobus offers fascinating material on the patron of the Arena Chapel and its stone effigy (a little-known work in an otherwise extensively studied monument), which, as she convincingly argues, Enrico Scrovegni originally commissioned to adorn the chapel’s exterior. In Chapter 3, Francis Ames-Lewis discusses Benozzo Gozzoli’s artistic persona, which sheds light on the Florentine tradition of artists’ self-portraits and differing responses to the antique in the quattrocento. In these first two essays, we encounter the two main streams of interpretation that these authors have applied to the theme of self-fashioning: the crafted selves that patrons wished to communicate to a particular public, or those that artists hoped to present to society at large for their own social advancement.

Jill Burke’s essay on the patronage of two prominent Florentines at a provincial oratory (Chapter 4) provides highly thought-provoking material for the self-fashioning of patrons. Her treatment of the wider issue of the legal and moral obligations of ius patronatus suggests the extent to which the whole concept of the “art patron” in regard to art commissioned for a devotional context may be anachronistic for the fifteenth century. She also offers some fascinating reflections on the practice of “guising” (the depiction of private donors as participants in works of sacred art).

Such considerations obviously have ramifications far beyond the volume’s stated theme. Indeed, this is one of the many pleasures of reading this collection, as virtually all of the essays contained within it point toward other, hardly less important issues. Rupert Shepherd’s essay (Chapter 5) on the close identification in the Italian Renaissance of works of art with the things represented in them is another example (e.g., the portrait with the portrayed or devotional images with the sacred figures depicted in them); his discussion of portrait likenesses as viable substitutes for the living struck me as especially important. In Chapter 10, Gabriele Neher investigates the problem of fashioning group identity, providing another excellent paradigm for identifying the patron’s share in the final appearance of a work of art. By choosing to analyze a group of altarpieces executed by Moretto da Brescia for a single Augustinian congregation in Brescia, she first establishes contemporary conventions for such works and then seeks out the distinguishing characteristics that may be attributable to patronage. In her analysis of memento mori portraits in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Britian (Chapter 15), Tarnya Cooper also discusses the self-crafted identity of a particular group, in this case British Protestant “non-hereditary elites” (198), and the importance of vanitas motifs; these works provide excellent comparative material for the state portraits of Catholic members of other European courts.

In Chapter 7, Rogers herself presents two case studies of those most artful Renaissance self-fashioners: courtesans. I found her analysis of Domenico Puligo’s portrait in an English private collection especially convincing, both for the identification of its probable subject, the courtesan Barbara Raffacani Salutati, renowned as Machiavelli’s lover, and for her important point that images of courtesans need not necessarily be overtly erotic. This point may seem self-evident, but to my knowledge it has not previously been raised in relation to works such as these in the literature; in the particular case of Puligo’s portrait, Rogers also has what is probably the earliest surviving example of a Renaissance portrayal of a woman studying books, reinforcing the point that the charms for which courtesans were renowned were not solely physical.

A possible courtesan portrait is also the subject of Mary Vaccaro’s essay in Chapter 8. She compares two well-known works by Parmigianino, the so-called Antea in Capodimonte, Naples, and the so-called Self-Portrait in the Uffizi, Florence. This gives rise to a fascinating discussion of gender identity in portraits, particularly regarding Renaissance standards for ideal male beauty, a topic that has received far less attention in the literature than that of ideal female beauty (the notable exception being Rogers’s own 1998 article, cited by Vaccaro, n. 38). While the author justly expresses serious doubts about the traditional identifications of these portrait subjects, she deftly weaves her treatment back to the problem of the artist’s own fashioned self.

In Chapter 6, Creighton Gilbert offers similarly wide-reaching material for this second line of inquiry, the history of artists’ self-fashioning, by addressing the problem of artists’ signatures. His examples span the history of art, from a little-known fourteenth-century Bolognese panel painter to Robert Rauschenberg. Here, the author confronts the distinct theoretical problems of signing as a practice and the interpretation of a signature’s meaning, paying particular attention to the work of Lorenzo Lotto.

Sixteenth-century Florence was home to endless examples of artists who sought to re-create their identity, and three of the best known—Benvenuto Cellini, Michelangelo, and Vasari—are examined individually here. Victoria C. Gardner Coates discusses Cellini’s description of the casting of the Perseus in his Autobiography as an example of self-presentation (Chapter 11). The author convincingly links this central portion of the Vita to the artist’s attempts to lay claim to the loftier title of “sculptor,” rather than that of “goldsmith,” by which he is still commonly known. I interpret the motivation for Cellini’s claims somewhat differently: Whereas Gardner Coates locates the origin of Cellini’s dissatisfaction in Duke Cosimo I’s insufficient financial remuneration for his work, I see this as only part of Cellini’s larger project, that is, to defend himself against charges of theft. The artist was accused by his enemies at the ducal court of having misappropriated valuable raw materials (i.e., more metal than was needed for the casting of the Perseus); similar charges had already been made against him during his French sojourn (not noted by the author). The Vita may therefore be considered largely a defense against these charges: the duke’s (and Francis I’s) parsimony thus explains the patron’s susceptibility to suggestions made by the artist’s enemies, while the famous episode in which Cellini tossed in the family pewter during the casting of the masterpiece may be pure invention meant to reinforce Cellini’s claim that not only had he not stolen ducal property, but also that he had actually donated his own precious patrimony for the project’s positive outcome.

In Chapter 12, Joan Stack considers Vasari’s use of images of artists in the Lives and the Libro di disegni to craft a common artist’s identity. I found her analysis of the Libro sheets as derived typologically from funerary monuments to be excellent. Still, this might have been taken even further—with no damage to the argument—by making direct comparison to a famous artist’s tomb also designed by Vasari: Michelangelo’s in the Florentine church of Santa Croce. The comparison is strongly suggested by the accompanying figures, in which Vasari’s homage to Carpaccio from the Libro appears opposite the Santa Croce monument, but no explicit comment is made in the text.

Michelangelo’s identity, however, is explored in the following chapter; Frances E. Thomas discusses not the artist’s well-known attempts to craft, or at least edit, his public persona for posterity, but the Florentine appropriation of Michelangelo as a symbol to create a distinct “national” identity. This is a remarkable case, not least of all because the construction of the artist as local hero began during his own lifetime, in precisely those years when he refused to return to his homeland. Vasari as author and creator of identities returns in Paola Tinagli’s essay on the Ragionamenti (Chapter 14). Here, this text is treated, certainly correctly, not as a guide to the original iconographic program of the artist’s Palazzo Vecchio decorations, but as an “ex post facto elaboration” (190) whose function was dynastic propaganda rather than a simple gloss.

One of the finest essays in the collection is Tatiana C. String’s on Henry VIII’s focused use of artistic and ephemeral media to communicate his constructed self to specific sectors of the English public (Chapter 9). The author addresses an issue rarely confronted with adequate attention in patronage studies—the nature of the intended audience for a work of art. String presents three cases of Henry’s attempts to communicate his crafted self to two widely different publics: the highly educated elite of the Tudor court and the larger, mostly uneducated mass of English subjects. Her examples are perfectly chosen to contrast a work intended solely for the eyes of the former (Holbein’s Whitehall mural) with a work intended primarily to be viewed by the latter (the title page of the Great Bible), and finally a work intended for both publics, appropriately layered to impress both equally (the ephemera for Anne Boleyn’s coronation procession). The author’s analysis of the limits of “propaganda” as a concept in art theory, especially when the issue of access is ignored, is particularly brilliant, and her argument made me think critically of the uses I myself have made of this term in my writing.

Fashioning Identities will obviously be of interest to specialists but is accessible enough to be used fruitfully by undergraduates. The essays contained within it would make excellent discussion texts for both undergraduate and graduate seminars on a wide range of topics. Ashgate is to be complimented for once again choosing to publish a stimulating collection of Renaissance historical studies and for the high standards of quality applied in its production. A subsequent volume of essays produced by the same house has employed a lesser grade of paper and demonstrates a reduction in photographic quality. It would be regrettable if this represented a change in Ashgate’s publishing policy; one would hope that the standards employed in Fashioning Identities will remain the general ones for such works.